Nobody Knows My Name: On Maya Binyam’s “Hangman,” Claire Denis’ “White Material,” and African Fictions
Maya Binyam | Hangman | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2023 | 194 Pages
The shorthand used to sell a book, the copyedited premise printed on its inner flap or back, typically has very little to do with what the narrative actually offers. I tend to ignore the vague promises made by book blurbs and enter into a novel with as little priming as possible. Working in a bookstore, I read any number of back covers a week, take some of these books home, finish them, and feel duped or happily surprised. The conceit of Maya Binyam’s debut novel Hangman was hard to pass over. As I straightened it out on the new fiction table up at the front of the shop, I was drawn in by its enigmatic ad-copy.
In Hangman, an unnamed man goes back to an unnamed African country for the first time in twenty-six years, unable to clearly remember the nation or anyone in it, in search of a dying brother. With very little to go by, I found myself making a number of assumptions commonly made about fiction written about migration from Africa, and migration back. Would this be a meandering, highly allusive narrative about alienation and severed ties to one’s cultural inheritance in the spirit of Teju Cole’s Open City? Would this be a generational saga that brings two characters back together across far flung continents in the spirit of Americanah? Or to turn to cinematic representations of Africa, would this be, like Claire Denis’ White Material, a depiction of a nation in the throes of civil war, from the fraught vantage point of a European settler? I bought the book, brought it home, then admonished myself for asking these questions in the first place. It’s unfair to subject this novel to an inheritance it never asked for.
It’s true that all fiction working within a genre has to account explicitly or implicitly for the way it deals with the weighty baggage of convention and reader expectation. But that would suggest that African diasporic literature is a genre, and, of course, it isn’t. What do writers as disparate as Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alain Mabanckou, Ama Ata Aidoo, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Maya Binyam have in common? Very little. Still, many readers come to these writers and others expecting a kind of autoethnography. Too many come away conflating a single narrative with the entire diasporas they hope these novelists will sufficiently represent in two-hundred odd pages. Hangman’s cleverness lies in that it preempts many of those assumptions. It beats its readers to the punch. If Binyam doesn’t name the country, or any of her characters, her obligations to faithfully render them are diminished.
In addition to all of Binyam’s characters being unnamed, their descriptions are also regularly recycled. Everyone is “ugly-looking,” “good-looking,” or when it comes to missionaries and their food, “nothing-looking.” The narrator’s characterization of himself is similarly flat. We never learn much about his appearance, his marriage, or his personal history. We can speculate which country he fled and what political affiliations led first to his imprisonment and then his exile, but it wouldn’t matter. I accepted this nondescript presentation of an unfamiliar world because I understood that knowing more about his youth or motivations wouldn’t make him any less opaque, nor would it offer any sort of recourse for his problems: medical, existential, or otherwise. He is at odds with the unnamed American town where he works as a cab driver. When a passenger calls him a racial slur, he looks around in confusion thinking they must be speaking to someone else. If he didn’t understand racialization in America before, he was introduced to it then. He is even more out of step with the African country where he left his wife, son, and possessions (including an old Sedan that he bought from a white diplomat). There is no explanation or exposition that might undo or alleviate the mounting confusion and alienation he experiences and while more information might engender fond feeling, it wouldn’t change a thing.
There’s the sense that he could fall into an aimless conversation and later discover the stranger he is speaking to is a long lost relative. Many of his conversations are misdirecting, deliberately and humorously so, but that is ultimately part of the intricate construction of the novel. In one instance, the narrator wanders into a familiar town after a series of diversions and is met by a blonde missionary. She offers him salvation. In a scene that is characteristic of Binyam’s black humor, the narrator follows her toward her mission, where she lives with other evangelists, only to realize that it is his former home, passed down through generations, now repurposed as an outpost for European apostles. What follows is a quintessential feature of any hero’s journey: a return. Except the narrator's surroundings are totally defamiliarized. The furniture is new, they’ve put in plush carpets that make it look like a sex den. Even the more familiar features, like the servants’ quarters, are eerie mutations of what he remembers. He watches the missionaries eat bland food on the dining table in the home where he was raised. We see this journey then as a descent toward an irretrievable past where you go home and nobody knows you, or those who do know you can’t help you.
In a particularly striking scene, the narrator visits a church. We might anticipate a moment of coming to God, an ecstatic revelation, if we were reading a different book and didn’t already know our character very well. Instead, he encounters a priest, kisses the cross, and immediately worries that the cross has not been properly sanitized. More than any longing for grace, the narrator desperately wants to know how thoroughly the priest cleans his crucifix. Does he use soap? Hot water? This brush with the divine ends up being nothing more than a nuisance. In the pace we’ve come to expect in the novel, we move on quickly to the next disturbance. Our narrator encounters a soldier while exiting the church who insists he pay the tourist’s fee for his visit. He can’t pay the fee partly because he inexplicably left his wallet with a bank teller, but apart from that, he simply does not feel obligated to pay the fee because he does not see himself as a tourist. He was born in the country they are standing in and the church was nationalized as a historic site, a historic site he has a rightful claim to as one of the country’s citizens. The guard is not persuaded by his explanation and blocks him from leaving. They continue this back and forth and the narrator produces an American passport. The narrator pleads his case, insisting that he didn’t choose to leave his home country, he left to avoid political imprisonment. Because of all of this he feels entitled to free entry. His documents say otherwise. Again, what he feels is immaterial.
During this scene, I found myself unexpectedly indifferent to the man’s plight. I don’t think this was a failure on Binyam’s part, an inability to drum up sympathy for her character. Instead, by side-stepping sympathy as a potential response, I felt Binyam freed up her readers to respond to the text neutrally, even to potentially not care for the narrator at all, a surprising orientation when you consider that this exchange with the soldier is ultimately a distillation of a former refugee returning to his country of origin and finding himself treated as a stranger, or a tourist. How much do we need to know in order to empathize with a subject? I didn’t forge an inappropriate bond with Binyam’s narrator based on emotional pyrotechnics. But I did better understand his situation, his history or at the very least his inability to live in it. I never learned enough about Hangman’s central character to empathize, I read instead out of a curiosity about his obfuscations.
In the case of Clair Denis’ film White Material (2009), a better question might be: how much evidence do we need before we can rightly condemn a subject? Like Hangman, White Material is also set in an African nation that purposely leaves out the name of the country it depicts. For this reason, I couldn’t help but think of it as I read Binyam’s novel. In this tense drama, Denis follows Maria, a stubborn French owner of a coffee plantation (played by Isabelle Huppert) who stays on her plantation while a civil war breaks out, long after all the white settlers have already left town. French troops have pulled out of the unnamed nation, an amalgam of any number of former Francophone African colonies, and they warn Maria of the danger of staying behind. Denis offers a dynamic portrait of a settler’s mind during a period of looming upheaval. Maria is not purely motivated by greed as her plantation makes no money. She is actually in mounting debt. She also isn’t motivated by a pure love of the land or any romantic notions about its people. She seems to lead an altogether pleasureless life. She isn’t the pure embodiment of colonial ideology either, she doesn’t function as a nod to any sense of predestination. She harbors a rebel fighter who she finds in her home when to do so is deadly, considering the encroaching government troops.
We can’t be sure just why she does what she does. Her desires, much like the desires of Binyam’s narrator, are unclear, if either can even be said to have real desires at all. It’s clear very early on in Binyam’s novel that the narrator’s logic is defined by endless equivocation. He can’t make up his mind, and when he does make choices, even one as simple and inconsequential as turning left or right down a hallway, he weighs all the possibilities and spares no detail. Following the path of his uncertainty might feel tedious, if it weren’t so propulsive. Rather than being immobilizing or suffocating, his indecision pushes him further out into this world he has not seen in decades, bringing us along. He might seem like an inept guide, remembering very little and dismissing what he does remember in favor of listening to his colorful cast of interlocutors who talk history, capitalism, bureaucracy and NGOs while he listens, but his aimlessness turns out to be a very effective device.
White Material’s Maria ignores danger until she can’t. She finds herself at a roadblock manned by rebels who ask her to pay her fine. This isn’t a surprise as the roadblocks are a regular fixture of life during the civil war. Still, she refuses to pay. “I know all of you,” Maria says. She calls all of the men by name, even evoking the memory of one of their fathers who she knew well. The men at the roadblock are unmoved, her memory of them does nothing to change their orientation toward her. They disavow whatever foreknowledge they have of another, seeing themselves instead as players in a collective struggle designed to upend the past order. In the end, she’s a white French owner of a coffee plantation and they happen to reject all that she represents. The men draw their guns and point them at Maria. If she does not pay the toll they’ve imposed, she can’t pass. Her memories count for nothing at all. In this scene and throughout the film, viewers come up against the limits of sentimentality, of nostalgia. There are no good white settlers or noble savages here. The emotionality of the film is suppressed. Feelings are beside the point. Denis makes it apparent that there are many periods of unrest in which nostalgia has no place. Only the present exists.
As the civil war between the military and the rebels intensifies, Maria’s behavior becomes even more erratic and inexplicable. She hires a slew of workers to harvest coffee she will never live to sell. She puts others in danger, getting one of the African laborers shot dead because she is too stubborn to pay the rebels’ fines. She isn’t just not thinking straight, she isn’t thinking at all. Her poor judgment is fatal for others. But to call her guilty is difficult. She isn’t acting as an individual. We see her less as a person than an emblem of a dying empire. In this way, Maria transcends straightforward characterization as a villain even as her very presence is unjust. Similarly, Binyam teases the idea of the narrator’s culpability throughout this slim novel. His innocence hangs in the balance, though we don’t know what he’s done for the majority of the narrative. He may have abandoned a child, he may have denied money and medicine to a sick brother. Mentions of sensational crimes float into the novel through dispatches from American radio stations. A reader can’t help but wonder if the narrator is guilty of something more heinous than abandoning his old life, something that he himself does not know about. But culpability presumes the willful transgression of a rational individual capable of understanding the law.
Guilt is a source of vitality in both Denis’ and Binyam’s narratives. Reading this novel and watching this film, it occurred to me that the methods that create sympathetic characters are the same methods that are used to construct criminality. Here is someone who can be known, a moral agent that can make knowing choices, right or wrong. The reflex that compels us to identify with sympathetic characters in literature is the inverse of the reflex that compels us to condemn villains. Too often apprehending the villain or rooting for the victim is meant to edify the reader, to give them a moral education in the process, all the better if that education offers some insight into what’s going on in Africa.
What White Material does, and what Hangman does even more elusively, is craft African characters that go beyond the limitations of sympathy, to depict periods of upheaval where pity is a useless consolation, where we cannot generalize any specific case. In this sense, the obfuscation of a name isn’t just a clever evasion. Even as I think of Hangman now, weeks after having reread it, it is its omissions I remember. It gestures toward the inexplicable, as if that is where everything leads, particularly when it comes to questions of cultural belonging. It eschews the universal, the generalizable, instead narrating the minute and the opaque. Binyam’s novel, and Denis’ film, leave us in unknowable and unnamable territory, unsure of who to root for or where to cast blame. We’re left instead to deal with the possibility that these characters, and these countries, cannot be slotted into one category or another. Perhaps these dispatches from anonymous countries come as a reminder to do away with our eagerness to make any single character a stand-in for any group, let alone a nation.